I am working as a lecturer in biochemistry in the university of Nottingham. I am writing to you because I have perform a 16S rRNA next generation sequence of the microbiome associated to mice tissues. Right now we have identified the microbiota community associated with those tissues but we would like to predict the metabolic profile of that bacteria community. I have read your Nature Communication paper about “Predicting metabolic profile of microbial community…”. We do not have any experience on that area and I would like to know if you could advice me on any software (i.e.Picrust) that we can use to predict metabolic profile of microbial community by using information from 16S NGS software.
Thank you very much in advance,
Felix
Sorry for the delay! You can use PICRUSt to predict the metabolic potential of a microbial community from 16S rRNA sequencing data (i.e. likely enzyme / pathway content). Predicting metabolite abundances – the focus of the paper you cited – would require some samples with paired 16S and metabolomics data for training.